Zafaryab Ahmed arrived at Colby on December 15, exhausted from 50 hours of travel, nursing a head cold and minus his luggage. Since he had neither a winter coat nor boots, his first stop in Maine was at a K-Mart.     The next day he explored the campus to meet people he knew only through e-mail. When he visited Eustis, he told a joke about a couple of communists and a talking parrot who gets stuffed in the deep freeze to keep him from insulting Leonid Brezhnev. When the parrot comes out of the freezer meekly mouthing the party line, Brezhnev says, "Now you see why we send troublemakers to Siberia."     The joke not only established that a serious man with a passionate commitment to human rights has a sparkling sense of humor, it also revealed that a self-acknowledged troublemaker arriving in the frozen north had serious questions about why his government wanted him to be there. Jailed in 1995 on sedition charges for his human- rights work, he was detained for more than four months this year before personal intervention by the prime minister permitted him to travel to Maine. When he arrived he acknowledged that his release was a face-saving compromise for the Pakistani establishment he had offended. By giving him a limited 90-day travel permit, they didn't have to execute him, they didn't have to exonerate him, and he might not come back to plague them.     Ahmed, a dissident Pakistani journalist and human rights gadfly, came to Colby for the first fellowship granted by the Oak Institute for the Study of International Human Rights. He arrived during exams, and the departure of students and closing of dining halls for the holidays may have reinforced the Siberian motif. When students returned and he finally addressed the College on January 14, he described two traditions in Pakistan that help put his own situation in context. First, the heroic role of the dissident in Islamic Pakistani culture: "Those who choose to tread this path should be prepared to suffer, prepare to be branded as enemy agents and ridiculed as worthless" to bring attention to their cause. Second, "We have a tradition that comes from the Sufi saints of walking to the gallows with honor. And if it comes to that, I will walk to the gallows with honor."     The cause that Ahmed is willing to die for is rooted in an economic web that connects Americans' lust for inexpensive consumer goods--hand-knotted carpets and soccer balls among them--and the peshgee system, where employers make advance payments to workers who then become bonded laborers. As he describes it, peasants go to work and end up borrowing money from their employer, or they send their children to work to try to pay off their debts. Members of the working class usually cannot read the debt records that employers keep and they end up owing more the longer they stay employed, Ahmed says. They may not leave their employer until their debt is paid, so they sink from bonded labor into virtual slavery. He described conditions in Pakistan's brick kilns, carpet factories and other industries as sub-human, exploiting children who toil without families, without schools and without aspirations or hope for a better life.     "Children are a commodity; they are not treated as human beings," he said. "The way people have tried to understand it is according to the rules they use to understand their own societies, which are not applicable." In addresses to various groups in Maine he stressed the complicity of Western consumers and the responsibility that Americans share for the chronic human-rights abuses in developing countries. "It is not the producers in countries like Pakistan that are solely responsible; it is the entrepreneurs and buyers here in the West who also benefit from illegal labor practices, " he said. "We have to decide who pays for what."     The government outlawed the peshgee system in 1992. Ahmed said at the time that it was naïve to expect many thousands of impoverished and illiterate children and adults to be freed from bonded indebtedness as a result. Two years later the government's ban had produced virtually no progress, and Ahmed was hired as a consultant to the Bonded Labour Liberation Front (BLLF), an organization dedicated to releasing and rehabilitating children from the brickyards and carpet factories. It was there that he met Iqbal Masih.